Thursday, August 30, 2012

What was Montaigne’s point in writing his Essais? Although
the essays include history, philosophical meditations, literary criticism and
something like reportage, Montaigne disclaims any ambition to be a historian,
philosopher or poet. He recurs, again and again, to the notion of the
self-portrait. Like the painters whose works he saw in Paris when he traveled
there, he would paint himself. But he did not take this to mean that he would
write his autobiography. Rather, most often, he talks about following his
“fantasies”. This movement is in correspondence with a larger theme: that life
is continually in motion. This motion is in everything – and Montaigne often
seems to want to find stylistic equivalents for it, shocks for his audience. Thus,
along with the dignified image of a man painting his own portrait, Montaigne
would also describe his work in much lower terms. This is what he writes at the
beginning of “On Vanity”:

“I cannot compose the register of my life by my actions, for
fortune has put them too low. I compose it then of my fantasies. It is thus I
have seen a gentleman who could only communicate his life by the operations of
his stomach: You see him show in his home an order of basins, produced over
seven or eight days: this was his study, his discourse. To him, any other kind
of talk stank. Here, to put it a bit more civilly, are the excrements of an old
spirit: now hard, now soft, and always undigested.”

This passage creates a difference, a moment in
reading in which the reader is torn away from the intimacy of his act. A note
in the Pleiade edition attributes the anecdote about the gentleman who displays
his feces for his guests to a classical source. But the final comparison of the
essays to an old man’s scat is Montaigne’s own. The high/low register, here,
is, as it were, unfettered from its usual structuring difference: high and low
interpenetrate one another, and the hierarchy in which the high has dominion is
pronounced, metaphorically, by a shit. This delight in perspectival paradoxes,
in making ambiguous the register of the discourse, isnot a unique stylistic discovery of Montaigne’s. The Baroque
poets and Protestant ministers are already finding a rhetorical energy in the
shocks of mortality, juxtapositions that are meant to induce a religious
vertigo – a strong sense of the present as owed entirely to death, against an
eternity that is ruled by a deity whose thoughts are entirely unknown. These
shocks are all the more charged in that they could be turned to deliver blowsto hierarchy’s projection in the social – to
republican, or at least frondeur uses.

It is not to this use of opposites, though, that I want to
point us. It is, rather, to something else, something having to do with
Montaigne’s intention to write within a rejection of genre,even at the risk of presenting us with old
man’s scat. Eric Auerbach pinpoints something important about the method of
Montaigne’s Essays that relates to Montaigne’s sense of the perpetual flux of
things:

“Every kind of specialization falsifies
the moral picture; it presents us in but one of

our roles; it consciously leaves in
darkness broad reaches of our lives and destinies. From a book on Greek grammar
or international law the author's personal existence cannot be known, or at best
only in those rare cases where his temperament is so strong and idiosyncratic
that it breaks through in any manifestation of his life. Montaigne's social and
economic circumstances made it easy for him to develop

and preserve his whole self. His needs were
met halfway by his period, which had not yet fully developed for the upper
classes of society the duty, the technique, and the ethos of specialized work,
but on the contrary, under the influence of the oligarchic civilization of
antiquity, strove for the most general and most human culture of the
individual. Not one of his known contemporaries advanced in this direction so
far as he did. Compared with him they are all specialists: theologians,
philologists, philosophers, statesmen, physicians, poets, artists; they all
present themselves to the world par quelque marque particuliere et estrangiere.
Montaigne too, under the
pressure of circumstances, was at times lawyer, soldier, politician; he was the
mayor of Bordeaux for several years. But he did not give himself over to such
activities; he

merely lent himself for a time and
subject to recall, and he promised those who laid tasks upon him de resprendre en main, non pas au poulmon et au
foye ( 3, 10, p. 438).”

Auerbach’s term, specialization, refers
to a broader sweep of divisions of activity than employment. The sociologist
Abram de Swan has written about the professionalization and
proto-professionalization that affects “experts” and “lay people” as
follows:

The internal process of professionalization creates external
effects among ever-widening circles of laymen, who adopt the basic stances and
fundamental concepts of the profession as a means of orientation in everyday
life: it is a process of proto-professionalizaiton, in which laymen learn to recognize
some events as “a case for the lawyer’, others as a ‘suitable case for
treatment”, and so on.

Auerbach attributes a part of Montaigne systematic, though
non-systematized distaste for the professional orientation towards life,
whether we represent the professional as a poet or an academic, to the fact
that this attitude was such that he could afford it -he was, as he points out often, the heir of his father, a man who
was good with “affairs”. Affairs is the word Montaigne uses to describe the household
as an economic unit. He is not himself interested in expanding his economic
reach, at least in his own account. That lack of desire to have more is etched
deeply into the Essais, and is thematically germane to Montaigne’s contempt for
‘specialization’. Montaigne knew that his nobility was recent, and that his
family history was populated with money-makers.On his mother’s side, his ancestors were, in all probability,
Spanish Jews, who originally specialized in the old clothes trade and branched
out to other goods once they moved to France. Pierre D’Eyquem, his father, was
a noble – he is so denominated in his marriage contract – because his
grandfather, Ramon, had purchased the Chateau of Montaigne, which conferred a
title of minor nobility. Before that purchase, the Eyquem family had been known
primarily for merchandizing wine and dried fish.

So there is a sense in which Montaigne’s debt to his father
could only be paid by managing affairs himself. That debt is unpaid. And the
activity that would go to make up that debt is even viewed with scorn. This is
a ‘fold’ not only in the text of the Essais, but in Montaigne’s own life.
Walter Benjamin once wrote that the true dynamic in history is not a matter of
cause, but a matter of “debt” – Schuld – meaning, as well, guilt. The past is
always a guilty past, a past we owe a debt to. Montaigne’s liberation – what
his fantasies have done for him – is to gradually transform his perception of
the debt he owes his father into a perception of the debt he owes himself – the
debt he owes through the fact that he exists and experiences. This, too, is the
result, the physical result, of his parent’s action. It is in the face of these
twin debts that Montaigne forms his attitude towards the professional
orientation and its social coordinates – broadly, custom, which he saw as
logically hostile to the broadness of life. Montaigne often comments that his
Essays are attempts to paint himself, to think of himself, to find out what he
is; the antithesis of this project is the professionalization of experience.
One of the stylistic and thematic peculiarities of the essays is how often
Montaigne seems to go out of his way to contradict one assertion with another,
one citation with another, one anecdote with another. Montaigne employs the
same mode of shock to his own ‘specialty’ – that is, the writing of the essays.
The metaphor of painting oneself has an acceptable correlate among the arts –
but the metaphor of excrements is a way of making the sense that we touch the
author when we touch the book turn into something taboo.

As everyone knows, the best Danish tv program ever was
Kingdom (Riget), the Lars van Trier weirdness. And in fact I’d go so far as to
say that no other program featuring autistic, dwarfish dishwashers as a Greek
chorus to the main events was as good as Lars van Trier’s version of an
autistic, dwarfish pair of dishwashers acting as a Greek chorus to the main
events in the show. My favorite character in Riget is, of course, the evil
Swedish doctor, who comes to the Danish hospital trailing rumors of malpractice
in his native Sweden. The show made his denunciations of Denmark a regular
feature: as I recall, many episodes ended with him standing on the hospital
roof, looking towards Sweden, and showering curses – like a Swedish
Mephistopheles – down upon the incorrigibly backwards Danes. “Here is Denmark,
excreted from limestone. There is Sweden, chiselled from granite. Danish
scum!”Here’s the Youtube link thatlines up all the curses.

However, Kingdom was a one shot deal. Lately, A. and I have
been watching Borgen, another Danish tv series. This one is about a female
prime minister – you can see it on Linktv, complete with English subtitles. It
is an interesting study in Role Model Liberalism. The prime minister is elected
as a moderate – which, in tv land (and in the media) – is the G spot of
politics. The idea actually goes back to Aristotle’s Rhetoric –we take social
temperaments or positions, we label them as extremes as one type or another,
and we then have a mathematical grasp of them, so that we can find the middle.
A young man is impetuous, an old man is scared of any change, and a middle aged
man is sometimes impetuous, and sometimes scared of change – or prudent. This
sociology of types has long been obsolete, but in the media world, it is
applied religiously to politics: if the left wants x and the right wants z,
why, y must be just what the world is waiting for! This method makes no sense,
since it neither diagnoses the political problem nor the solution.However, it has tremendous fans in the
media, in which the people who are ‘opinionmakers’ or tv series directors are paid
enormously and want to keep their class positions, but at the same time have
identified themselves as representatives of a long tradition of progress. It is
the same impulse that keeps geriatric rock n roll bands singing tunes full of
old adolescent sneering.

The show I boggled at was one involving a crisis –the show
is set up around the old crisis/solution format – that occurs when the Prime
Ministerdaringly introduces a law that
would force corporations to institute parity between men and women (50-50) on
their corporate boards. This is introduced with the implication that here we
have the latest in ultra-feminism. That the measure would simply affect say one
hundred wealthy women in Denmark is never, quite, brought to the fore. The
reason is that this is the feminism of role models, and obviously the writers
and producers think that the triumph for some corporate dog is a triumph that
can be shared by all women. Just as women could once look at movie starsand dream a little dream, now they can look
at the rich and sassy bread ofcorporate heads and feel liberated deep inside.

Role model liberalism used to be called tokenism and other
dirty names, in the radical sixties,but it has gradually crept into the very texture and weave of the contemporary
liberal or progressive ethos, and not only in America. Of course, the crisis in
the show was averted when finally, the prime minister and the CEO of Denmark’s
biggest corporation face off and she gets him to yield – cause he’s a very
human curmudgeonly CEO. Of course – no caricatures of Mr. Moneybags in the era
ofRole model liberalism!

Luckily, the show realizes that role model liberalism is
incorrigibly dull –thus, the real juicein it all tends to the standard soap opera themes that are our real role
models for getting into and out of trouble in the prisonof ordinary life : will the p.m.’s husband
adjust to her new fame? Will the spokesman have an affair with the Labour
Minister? Role modelliberalism
dissolves, at the crucial points, into the older appetites. I like the older
appetites a great deal, but I feel like raining curses on Denmark whenever the
moderate political solution raises its ugly head in the program.

Monday, August 27, 2012

Character, unlike the soul, or the person, or the self, has
never settled its ontological accounts, so that it can be said to exist in the
“world” or in the “representation of the world”.

Seventeenth
century character books were written in the shadow of the ut pictura poesis –
which gains its legitimacy not just in the tradition of the humors, but in the
tradition of the portrait. Plutarch, at the beginning of his life of Alexander,
makes the association between the picture and the character explicit:

“For
it is not Histories that I am writing, but Lives; and in the most
illustrious deeds there is not always a manifestation of virtue or vice, nay, a
slight thing like a phrase or a jest often makes a greater revelation of
character than battles when thousands fall, or the greatest armaments, or
sieges of cities. Accordingly, just as painters get the likenesses in
their portraits from the face and the expression of the eyes, wherein the
character shows itself, but make very little account of the other parts of the
body, so I must be permitted to devote myself rather to the signs of the
soul in men, and by means of these to portray the life of each, leaving to
others the description of their great contests.” [B. Perrin, translation]

The association of the character with the sketch, the
picture and the mask pulls the concept into the domain of representation, and
it is here that “Alexander” can become a character in an anecdote or a life.
The association of character with expression, with what is under the surface,
with virtue and vice, pulls it into the domain of the self, the person, the
soul – and, most importantly, of cause. It is here that character can impose
itself in history, for it is not simply the character Alexander, but the
character of Alexander, that is exposed in his Life. In the first association
of character we can see the roots of the notion of alienation – an imprisonment
in obsessions, routines, repetitions, humors. Self-representation, then, does
have a causal status in as much as it causesothers to act in a certain way to the imprisoned character, and the
prison grows more impenetrable as the character precedes to write itself into
this script. In the second, character is something outside of the prison,
something recognizing, something that stands, emblematically, before the good
and the bad, the act and the habit. In its second guise, character can be
‘acted upon’, trained. Character, here, is linked to education – in the
humanist tradition, in a text like Montaigne’s The ‘institution’ [education] of
children’, character is the central object of all teaching.

It is the conceptual fate of character that it should have
these two analytically distinct poles, and that historically, as they coalesce
in the semantic space of “character”, they bleed into one another.

The way character has come to straddle these realms of
being makes it hard to imagine (for an "us", a Westerner, a paleface, a member in good standing of the artificial paradise) a culture with a semantic table of fundamental
elements that wouldn’t have a word for, or a notion of, character.

In his Begriffsgeschichte – The history of
concepts – Reinhardt Koselleck pays homage to a predecessor in the field of
understanding intellectual history emically: Richard Koebner. The homage is
also a parable. Koebner began, in the twenties, by looking at the medieval
period in Köln, writing a book entitled 'Anfängen des Gemeinwesens der
Stadt Köln”. In the book, Koebner examined what 12 century burgers of Cologne
could have meant when they used such terms as “urbs” or “civitas”. But, as
Koselleck points out, Koebner didn’t think as much about what a 1920s German
might mean by “Gemeinwesens” – community. “In retrospect,
today’s reader might of course stumble over the fact that Koebner used as his
highest thematic concept for the republican conception of the city,
“Volksgemeinschaft” (community of the people), not really a concept derived
from the sources, but a modern concept of the 19th and 20th
century that he projected onto the high middle ages. He was thinking primarily
on the legal factor that a republican city state would allot equal rights to
citizens. We may be certain that Koebner, twelve years later, as he was forced
to emigrate to Palestine, would no longer have used the concept of
‘Volksgemeinschaft”. For it was just this concept that, extended under
evidently racist criteria, served as the battle cry to exclude Jews from the
‘Volksgemeinschaft’. If yu like, Koebner was one of the early victims of this
semantic displacement, that allowed and evoked the death of hundreds of
thousands of German citizens and millions of innocent people. Koebner must have
remarked upon this as he emigrated from Breslau to Jerusalem in 1934.” [58]

Koebner, then, is a case not only of a historian
who honed the methods of the history of concepts, but was also a victim of a ‘displacement’
of concepts – of meaning. Intellectual history may seem to have no claws, but –
Koselleck is saying – this is a delusion. There are no tamed beasts in history.

About Me

MANY YEARS LATER as he faced the firing squad, Roger Gathman was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover
ice. Or rather, to discover the profit making potential of selling bags of ice to picnicking Atlantans, the most glorious of the old man's Get Rich schemes, the one that devoured the most energy, the one that seemed so rational for a time, the one that, like all the others - the farm, the housebuilding business, the plastic sign business, chimney cleaning, well drilling, candy machine renting - was drawn by an inexorable black hole that opened up between skill and lack of business sense, imagination and macro-economics, to blow a huge hole in the family savings account. But before discovering the ice machine at 12, Roger had discovered many other things - for instance, he had a distinct memory of learning how to tie his shoes. It was in the big colonial, a house in the Syracuse metro area that had been built to sell and that stubbornly wouldn't - hence, the family had moved into it. He remembered bending over the shoes, he remembered that clumsy feeling in his hands - clumsiness, for the first time, had a habitation, it was made up of this obscure machine, the shoe, and it presaged a lifetime of struggle with machine after machine.